Narcissist and civic poet: the Pasolini variationsPier Paolo Pasolini is best known to the English-speaking world as the auteur of iconoclastic 1960s and 70s films such as The Gospel According to Matthew, Medea and The 120 Days of Sodom (and if we needed reminding, this publication comes with a foreword by American filmmaker James Ivory, whose foundation fin­anced the project).But by the time Pasolini made his first film, Accattone in 1961, he was already famous in his native Italy as a poet who had shaken up the status quo of hermeticism’s introspective and arcane lyrics, and as the key neorealist novelist of his generation, whose first novel, Ragazzi di vita(1955), resulted in obscenity charges.Indeed, one of the difficulties of talking about Pasolini, and the principal reason for his continuing mystique, is the range of his genius, as American poet and translator Stephen Sartarelli notes in a useful introduction to this book. Was he a filmmaker or poet? A traditional formalist or radical experimentalist? A Marxist or a Catholic? Elitist aesthete or exhibitionist? Artist or one-man political movement?Pasolini, who believed in the eternal coexistence of opposites, probably would have said all of the above. No figure embodies the polarised political situation and complex social tensions of Italy in this period so well. At the same time he is the most unique and narcissistic of artists, and his poetry manifests these contradictions. Here the inward-looking lyric urge wrestles with the desire to give voice to the demos, to become a civic poet in a tradition stretching back to Leopardi and Dante.
Gramsci’s Ashes (1957) brought Pasolini’s poetry to wider public attention and remains his most important volume. He termed these longish pieces poemetti, or mini epics, and their form resurrected Dante’s terza rima. This shape allowed Pasolini to be argumentative and take in gargantuan swathes of contemporary life, a fashion reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg. Pasolini’s style in this period is one of contamination: baroque floridness interrupts prosaic sprawl, ideological expositions sit beside personal reflections, Shelley is invoked alongside Marx. Done well such plurilingualism is exhilarating. However, it is resistant to translation, and my only reservation with this otherwise fine edition is the flatter linguistic patina in English.If the ideological regalia of these poems have dated this is because there are now no alternatives to our all-pervasive liberal consumer society. But as Pasolini, whose vision grew increasingly pessimistic towards the end of his life, was at pains to point out, the demise of class diversity was accompanied by a much greater loss. The ancient belief systems sustaining Italy’s agrarian society were suddenly vanishing. The traditions of the original Roman lower classes, who had been pushed to slums on the outskirts of the city under Mussolini, and which Pasolini celebrated in his early films and fiction, were being replaced by a culture of amoral individualism. For poets such changes meant (and still mean) an erosion of the reality on which the symbols and myths of our society are nurtured. We lose a living connection with our cultural patrimony. In a famous essay concerning the vanishing fireflies from the Italian countryside Pasolini described this process with characteristic polemic as anthropological genocide.As a testament to such issues and the heady political period in which he lived, however, I can’t help feeling that his prose and films will be of more lasting value. Poetry and activism rarely sit well together. Auden, who famously said poetry makes nothing happen, was wary of l’art engagé. It may create that illusion of social relevance every artist hankers after, but the consequence is shallow roots and a tree that withers quickly. Who still remembers Wordsworth’s sonnets in praise of capital punishment? In a different way Auden himself was a civic poet, for his work gave expression to our struggle to be individual and humane and reasonable. His poems may not incite direct action but, like the hermeticism of Eugenio Montale, they are sites of resistance and voices of clarity in a time of uncertainty.Today we are overwhelmed by the language of marketing and the plurality of voices vying to communicate with us. But in the absence of wider common values in which to judge such voices morally and aesthetically, it is the most insistent and loudest that enter our consciousness like mantras. Our ability to engage critically is broken down and the content is of secondary importance to the slogan. In this context, if poetry has a role, I like to think it is to create a space in which we take a step back and reflect. The word stanza, which we use to denote a group of lines of verse, is also the Italian word for room. We enter such rooms to encounter ourselves and our language, to feel grounded in reality, to dream, to hope.At the end of the title poem from Gramsci’s Ashes Pasolini describes his struggle to live with a conscious heart (cuore cosciente). In the best of his mature work this tension produced lasting poems such as The Cry of the Excavator and Plea to My Mother. It is also found in the lyric poetry he wrote in a little-known Friulian dialect at the beginning of his poetry career, generously sampled in this edition.Pasolini never shied away from polemic. He was subjected to 33 trials during the course of his life, all eventually resulting in acquittals. He received numerous death threats, was expelled from the Communist Party, was loathed and lauded in turn by the church. With his tragic and mysterious murder in November 1975 the world lost what Sartarelli rightly describes as a creative juggernaut, one of the great human and intellectual dramas of our time.

Simon West is a poet and Italianist. His most recent book is The Yellow Gum’s Conversion.The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini, A Bilingual EditionEdited and translated by Stephen Sartarelli; University of Chicago Press, 456pp, $71 (HB)

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